scope art

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We like oscilloscope art here at Hackaday, so it was natural to recently feature a Javascript based oscilloscope art generator on these pages, along with its companion clock. Open a web page, scribble on the screen, see it on the ‘scope.

As part of our coverage we laid down the challenge: “If any of you would like to take this further and make a Javascript oscilloscope Wrencher, we’d love to make it famous“. Which of course someone immediately did, and that someone was [Ted] with this JSFiddle. Hook up your soundcard’s left and right to X and Y respectively, press the “logo” button in the bottom right hand pane, fiddle with your voltages and trigger levels for a bit, and you should see a Wrencher on the screen. We’re as good as our word, so here we are making the code famous. Thanks, [Ted]!

It’s not an entirely perfect Wrencher generator, as it has a lot of points to draw in the time available, resulting in a flickery Wrencher. (Update: take a look at the comments below, where he has posted an improved JSFiddle and advice on getting a better screen grab.) Thus the screen shot is an imperfect photograph rather than the usual grab to disk, for some reason the Rigol 1054z doesn’t allow the persistence to be turned up in X-Y mode so each grab only had a small part of the whole. But it draws a Wrencher on the screen, so we’re pretty impressed.

The piece that inspired this Wrencher can be found here. If you think you can draw one with a faster refresh rate, get coding and put it in the comments. We can’t promise individual coverage for each effort though, we’re Hackaday rather than Yet-another-scope-Wrencher-aday.

Oscilloscope art is a fascinating pursuit in which waveforms are generated for the X an Y channels of an oscilloscope to draw pictures on its screen. It’s somewhat distinct from vector computer graphics of the type you might see in older arcade machines or the Vectrex console, in that while it uses a similar approach to creating a display it has a very different purpose. Sometimes these works can be breathtakingly beautiful animations, and other times maybe not so much.

If you’d like to explore the topic as a mild diversion, then maybe this Javascript oscilloscope art generator from [Neil Fraser] might be of interest. In around a hundred lines of code he’s created an in-browser scratchpad upon which a waveform can be drawn which will then be created as an audio signal on your computer’s soundcard. Hook up left and right to X and Y of your oscilloscope, and what you scribbled on the pad should pop up on the screen.

Draw it, see it on screen. Magic!

It’s an impressive piece of work that you can see in the video below or try for yourself, and your scribe’s Rigol was pressed into service to give it a go. After a bit of tweaking to find the right voltages and selecting slope triggering rather than edge triggering, we too were making squiggles appear on the screen.

It’s rather funny, he’s saved the best for last. As an afterthought, he also provides a link to another piece of his work, an oscilloscope clock in Javascript. If any of you would like to take this further and make a Javascript oscilloscope Wrencher, we’d love to make it famous.